


Never What It Seems

by CourtedByDeath



Category: Sherlock (TV)
Genre: Bloodplay, Knifeplay, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-04-11
Updated: 2013-04-11
Packaged: 2017-12-08 04:31:03
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 676
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/757076
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/CourtedByDeath/pseuds/CourtedByDeath
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>After the Fall, Sebastian reflects on his time with Jim and realizes he's not as stable as he thought.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Never What It Seems

**Author's Note:**

  * For [MD_Sora02](https://archiveofourown.org/users/MD_Sora02/gifts).



There was no limit to what he would do for him. There was no line that he wouldn’t cross for that man. Maybe it was loyalty, maybe it was more but- 

He wouldn’t call it anything like love. Love was for dime store novels and movies that played at the cinema to packs of couples and women clutching packets of tissues. He wasn’t the kind of person to believe in love because well Moran had his reasons. The biggest being he’d never known love personally.

What he had was loyalty, duty, dedication. Love had no place in the way he peered down from his perch, target in his sight; the way his finger tightened to almost lovingly squeeze and not jerkily pull the trigger. Nor did it have any place in the way he draw the razor-sharp line of his knife across waiting flesh, so that blood dampened the leather of his gloves or coated his bare fingers in slick sticky warmth. 

That wasn’t love it was a job. Everything between him and Jim Moriarty was a job and nothing more. At least that was what his mind latched on to and stuck with. It didn’t matter if Jim happily flirted, pressed and moved against him in ways that made the sniper wonder if he’d done something much different than been a criminal mastermind all his life. He never asked, they didn’t talk back-stories. There was no point; Jim needed a Sniper nothing more and Moran needed a job anything more was none of his business.

But there were times, when he was yanking the Irish man closer by his tie, pinning him to the wall to shield his smaller form with his own body when shit went pear-shaped. Or when the other had a firm hold on long blond hair, pulled his head back, a stiletto knife pressing into the skin just under Sebastian’s Adam’s apple, hissing into his ear with rage because things didn’t go as planned that he was certain it was more. 

More than a job. 

Tooth and nail he held tight to the mantra of, ‘It’s just a job,’ repeating it over and over in his head til he’s certain that he heads it in his sleep, that it’s burned into the bone that makes up his skull. It’s just a job even when Jim shoves his hand down inside the sniper’s worn jeans telling him softly that he wants to know what exactly a Basher Moran Special is from personal experience rather that from spying. It’s still a job the morning after when they wake in a bloodied tangled mess of bruises, bite marks; rope burns, and cuts. 

It’s no longer just a job. It stops being a job - it stops really being anything; it just fucking stops. There’s a jagged set of letters a J and M carved into his flesh just under his left collar bone. When only a few things are left it’s not a job. _Fuck,_ it all, it may have never been a job. But that didn’t matter anymore.

Not when all that was left was those letters on his skin and memories that liked to replay over and over anytime he closed his eyes. Ghosting fingers over the jagged J and the sharply formed M, he took a sip of his beer with a bitter laugh. “You always said you’d kill me, Boss. I thought you mean with a gun or knives or semtex. A pack of blood thirsty rabid tigers or wolves, whatever that twisted as fuck, brilliant mind of yours could cook up.” 

But that would be kind and Jim Moriarty was anything but kind. No. “You’re going to haunt me til it’s over.” Sebastian mused even as he leaned slightly into the phantom touch of the man only he could see. “I figure I’m all right with that, just make it snappy you, tosser.”

Even dead, Jim Moriarty owned his Tiger, the chain still just as painfully tight as the first day; body, life, heart and soul he was Moriarty’s man.


End file.
